Up’ards & Down’ards Wire Works Whisky

Feb 2024

A horizontal bottling of two ‘identical’ ex-red wine casks, filled the same month but matured in different locations; the upper and lower dunnages. Explores the maturational differences of warehouse location (temperature, humidity, air flow).

These unique bottlings of Wire Works single malt single cask whisky’s are named after the two teams who compete in the centuries old, local annual mob football match in the Derbyshire market town of Ashbourne. The match takes place over Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday between the Up’ards, (traditionally those from north of the Henmore brook), and the Down’ards (from south of the brook). The game is played throughout the town of Ashbourne and surrounding areas between two goals 3 miles apart. Ashbourne Royal Shrovetide Football

Full Wire Works Life-cyle of Flavour

The space we enjoy at the Wire Works means we can do everything on this single site, including warehousing all of our maturing whisky stock.  This adds unique provenance to the single malt whisky we make; every drop has a full life-cycle at the Wire Works.  We can understand and monitor the entire maturation stage, and we also have the ability to warehouse casks in different locations to tap into location variations in ambient temperatures, humidity and air flow.

We have 3 core warehouses, ideally suited for maturing our whisky stocks and all based on traditional dunnage style i.e. casks stacked on their sides, supported by wooden rails (or dunnage); the Lower Dunnage, the Upper Dunnage and Warehouse 6 (our largest warehouse space, and formerly the main wire drawing shed, dating back to the 1870’s).

The Wire Works 

The Whisky Baron 

Wire Works Up’ards & Down’ards

We’re curious about the potential role the different warehouse locations at the Wire Works can play in the development of flavour, and how we might use this knowledge in future plans.  For this bottling, we tried to control as many variables as possible (see below), with the warehouse location then being the key point of difference. (NB. due to being made of natural materials and made by hand, no two casks are exactly identical).

• Date casks filled: March 2019
• Malt batch: identical
• Spirit distillation cut points: identical
• Casking strength: identical (63.5% abv)
• STR casks specification and batch: identical (STR G2C AO/FO)